


A Glass of Clearest Light

by orphan_account



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Asexual Character, Disembowelment, Georgie and Martin go out drinking, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Jewish Character, Judaism, Leitners of Excessive Violence, M/M, Martin makes a lot of tea, Oblivious Jon, Protectiveness, Questions of humanity, Season 3 rewrite, Torture, weird religious overtones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-06 05:51:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 18,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15879849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: When Michael lets Martin reach Jon while Not Sasha is attacking, events take a slightly different turn.  Martin holes up with Jon at Georgie's and begins developing an unusual power set of his own, Jon doesn't shut everyone out, and the question becomes: does losing your humanity mean losing your self with it?





	1. Statement Ends

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to Kyros and my Michael for helping beta. Thanks to Zomburai, Kyros, lontradiction, and Teakwood for letting me throw excerpts at them. Thanks to Clione and Fenrir for general support. Some other more specific acknowledgements follow in the individual chapters.

[CLICK]

            There’s a light. I can see a light. There’s a light on my fingertips. Blood, too. Blood’s expected, maybe almost a relief. I can’t be a monster if I’m bleeding, can I? Well, monsters bleed. Some of them. I wasn’t expecting the light though. I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s just a sliver, just a tiny sunbeam. Not much, really, but it feels like the brightest light I’ve seen in—god—years. There’s moisture on my face. I’m crying. The light is warm, while the rest of my body is wrapped in loose, wet earth.

            I can’t feel my legs. I ought to be scared, but I’m not, I’m just—I’m tired. Maybe this is the end, but it doesn’t feel like that, either. It’s not that _numbness_ I’m so used to, you know? Where you’re so used to being scared that you just don’t bother anymore. This isn’t that at all.

            It’s like being safe. I don’t understand.

            “Jon!” someone says, voice away, upward, towards that sliver of light. “Jon, oh god, where are you? Please don’t be dead!”

            I don’t think I can speak, but then I hear myself speaking anyway. My voice comes out cracked and hoarse and I’m not actually sure what I’m saying, but I manage to call out _something_.

            “Oh, thank god,” the voice says rapidly. “Just hold on, I’m going to get to you. We’re going to dig you out of there. You’re going to be all right.”

            Am I? I wonder. How did I get here? Where is _here_? Everything’s dizzy and dim except that one little strip of light and the voice. I focus on those, and I follow the threads backward to find where all this started. It unspools before my eyes.

[CLICK]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by Zomburai :)))


	2. Nights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Martin and Jon share an airbed.

            “I think I might also kill you. It would be easier than killing the Archivist. None of you are protected down here.”

            Martin stared at the gently smiling curly-haired man. He felt as if he was missing something, but he didn’t _care_ , he just wanted to reach Jon. He _needed_ to reach Jon. There was no point in paying attention to the way his head was whirling faintly, that incipient heaviness in his stomach that was suggestive of a creeping wrongness. “No,” he said, although he knew it came out unsteady. “No, now, hang on—”

            But the man was still talking, in a high amused voice. “You are going to try and help him. And I want—” The man paused, suddenly, tilting his head to one side just a bit further than seemed—reasonable. “You know, perhaps it will be more amusing to watch him watch you die. Just you, though. No need for additional help.”

            “There’s two of us and—and only one of you,” Martin said hotly. “You can’t—”

            “Martin,” Tim said urgently. “Look at his hands. Oh, god, look—”

            Against his will, Martin felt his gaze drifting downwards. The heaviness in his stomach was replaced by the much more immediate and unpleasant sensation of his dinner threatening to resurface. “Oh,” he said limply, and then there was—a noise. It wasn’t a noise that belonged to the real world, not really, a ringing, hollow echo that inverted what should have been a familiar sound. Martin tried to cover his ears, but that didn’t seem to make much difference. There was—he wasn’t sure. There was a _something_ , and there was that twisting noise that was and wasn’t the sound of a door opening and shutting and then—Tim was gone.

            The man with the—Martin shuddered—hands laughed merrily, and then he was gone as well, taking the twisting of Martin’s stomach with him. Martin was left staring at the empty corridor. “Okay,” he said, partly to himself and partly to the cassette he still held clutched in one hand. “Well. Tim’s just vanished because a man with, eh, ehm, with, _hands_ took him, and I don’t—I don’t know where to look for him, so—so I suppose—I suppose I’d better find Jon. I know where to look for him. And he’s going to be all right. I don’t know—I don’t know _how_ , exactly, but he’s—he’s definitely going to be all right.”

            As he firmed his shoulders and headed down the corridor, he noticed that, in defiance of all reason, there was a tiny stream of sunlight collecting in one corner. Maybe a vent or an unintended chink the builders had somehow left or—whatever it was, the nonchalant little shred of brightness it let in made Martin feel just a little stronger.

~

            Pain, dull and pulsing, radiated from the center of Jon’s back and out through his limbs. Something scratched irritatingly at the back of his neck, and the breaths he drew in were stuffy and laden with hot moisture. When he tried to roll over, the surface beneath him shifted so oddly he felt almost ill.

            A sudden flood of bright light even through his eyelids made him groan and curl into a tiny ball so fast he almost kneed himself in the chin. The thing beneath him vibrated alarmingly.

            “Sorry—sorry.” The light diminished slightly, and Jon heard the clink of china as he slowly started to peel his eyes open. “Sorry,” Martin said again, quietly. “You okay?”

            An airbed, half-deflated. That was the weird, rubbery thing undulating beneath him. Georgie had inflated it for both of them the night before. Jon groaned, as the memories of the preceding day flooded in. He’d been so _close_. And in that one short moment of weakness, going outside for a cigarette with Martin hovering anxiously over him, it had all slipped out of his grasp again. He wanted to beat his head into the wall. How could he have been so _stupid_?

            “I’ll be fine.” The smell of tea and lemon reached his nostrils, and he looked over to see that Martin had set a porcelain cup down on the bedside table. Jon swallowed convulsively, his throat constricting scratchy and unpleasant. The tea smelled lovely.

            “Erm, thanks, Martin,” he said, rolling up on one elbow.

            “You’re welcome.” Martin gave him one of those—what Jon thought of as— _brave_ smiles, the kind he put on whenever he was trying to be cheerful in the face of untold horrors. It was ridiculous how comforting Jon found it. “I put a bit of milk in. You should drink it.”

            “Yes—all right—give it here.”

            _What has Jon done?_ The coppery smell of blood, the weird twisted angle of Leitner’s head, the awful pulpiness of the body beneath its sweater soaked with dark stains. The single _eye_ that had been dislodged and rolled forward out of the mess of brain matter. Jon pressed down on his own eyes as if trying to dislodge the sensations, but all that happened was that he saw staticky brown patterns in addition to remembering the lone, cheerful note of Sasha’s voice on the tape, before—before.

            “Jon!” Weight depressed the bed beside him. And Jon didn’t have his desk in front of him, and he didn’t have the distance anymore—not the distance of paranoia, not the distance of the Archivist, not even the distance of an employment hierarchy, really. He’d been fired, hadn’t he? They both had. Most people didn’t get fired for murder, Jon thought bitterly, or rather, most people had more to worry about afterwards. Martin hadn’t been fired for murder. Martin had been fired for believing Jon.

            Without that distance, Jon couldn’t stop himself from reaching out, grabbing a handful of Martin’s shirt, and pulling him close—close enough that Jon could rest a head on Martin’s shoulder, rub his cheek against the scratchy wool of the sweater that Martin was wearing. He could have cried into Martin’s shoulder, if he’d wanted to. If he’d been able to, more like. He shut his painful eyes wearily and felt Martin putting a shaky arm around his shoulders. Breathed in the scent of paper and tea.

            He didn’t say anything stupid like, “It’ll be all right,” although Jon thought he could have gone for a bit of meaningless reassurance right now. But the gentle warmth of Martin’s body against his would do for the time being.

~

            Martin wished there was more he could do than slide yet another cup of tea in front of Jon. He’d added a couple of biscuits as well this time, but Jon still looked awful. His face was pasty white, and there were dark bruises-like circles beneath his eyes, circles that had only grown deeper as he’d spoken to the recorder, spilling out like vomit a story that sounded like a horror film. And it’d happened when he was _eight_. Martin didn’t have words.

            So, in lieu of words, he did what he’d always done. He tried to make things easier. He went out and got Jon’s favorite brand of biscuits and tea, neither of which Georgie had in her flat. After some thought, he also got some of the squishy chocolate he knew they both liked. He was going to have to deal with getting a new job at some point—because G-d knew Jon wasn’t going to be able to—but for now he had a bit of money, especially since they weren’t exactly going to be paying rent. After some thought, he went to an ATM on the other side of town, just to be safe, and then bought the groceries with cash.

            He put the tea at Jon’s elbow and urged him to drink it, twitched the curtains open because otherwise Jon would just sit in shadow while he was recording things that—well, okay, Martin didn’t know on this one, but he always felt a little better in the sunlight. And Jon did give him a little wan smile, so he decided he’d probably made the right call. Not that there was much direct sunlight, it was pretty much all gloomy clouds except for one tiny little patch of hopeful blue. Martin focused on it, willing it to get bigger. It didn’t, but it didn’t get smaller either.

            After he’d finished what must have been the worst statement he’d ever given, Jon slumped forward in his chair, oozing around the cup of tea and the plate of biscuits.

            “Jon,” Martin tried; his only response was a restless sigh. “Do you need anything?”

            A limp wave of the hand. Martin sighed, pushing down the urge to go over and ruffle Jon’s hair. Instead he headed over to the door and slipped out into the hallway, where he leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes for a long moment. He wanted to be enough. He knew nobody could be, but that didn’t stop the sting of failure from rising in his throat.

~

            There was a moment of heart-stopping non-existence and then the hollow darkness of the night as Jon slipped directly from sleep to wakefulness. He was sitting up on the air bed, the air pumping in and out of his lungs rapidly, as if he’d been having a nightmare, but there was nothing in his head other than the black gulf of sleep separating him from the day before.           

            The light in Georgie’s hallway was on, spilling golden around the top, side, and bottom of the spare bedroom door. Not unexpected: Martin had asked if they could keep it on, and she’d agreed. Jon wouldn’t have gone that far, but he couldn’t deny that he was grateful. The yellow light was a comforting reminder that there was life outside of the Archive, even if it was probably forever beyond the grasp of the Head Archivist.

            He was still faintly puzzled that he couldn’t recall any nightmares having woken him; he must have been so tired that he’d slept dreamlessly, or perhaps his mind had simply, for once, given him a respite from the nightly horror show he usually endured these days. Scratching absently at one of the worm-scars on his arm, Jon started to lie down again, wondering why he had a sudden sense that something was subtly not right. He didn’t put two and two together until his arm fell onto the empty mattress beside him.

            There was no one in the bed with him. This should not have been odd, except that for the past week, Martin and he had been sharing the air mattress, and it was chilly without another body in the bed. Not that they’d been sharing much physical contact, but airbeds did get cold without another source of heat. Blearily, Jon rubbed a hand across his face. Where was Martin? Had he gone to get a drink of water?

            Jon ought to just go back to sleep. There was no reason for this persistent pounding of his heart. Well—no—perhaps there was. And he’d feel better if he checked.

            Sliding out of the bed, he padded over and looked down the hallway. The little kitchen at one end was dark and silent; the door to Georgie’s room was shut tight. But the door to the bathroom was ajar, and, as he stood there, a muffled sob wafted out of it.

            Should he go back to bed? For a long moment, Jon wobbled on the balls of his feet; then he sighed and headed towards the noise. Knocking gently, he pushed open the door to find Martin sitting on the edge of the bath, eyes puffy and bloodshot. He looked up in consternation as Jon entered.

            “Oh god,” he gulped. “I didn’t—I’m sorry. Did I wake you up?”

            “I’m not sure,” Jon replied honestly. “It doesn’t matter. I never sleep well.” The unspoken ‘anymore’ hung in the air between them, but Martin gave him a watery smile and sniffed.

            “Still, I’m sorry,” he said.

            Jon wanted to touch him, wanted to go over and sit down beside him and pull Martin’s head against his shoulder the way Martin had pulled him in the first day he’d woken up in Georgie’s flat, but he didn’t quite know how to begin, so instead he hovered in the doorway. “Erm, I could make you a cup of tea?” he offered, and Martin laughed tearfully.

            “No, thanks, tea at night keeps me awake. Perhaps I should have a little chocolate to calm my nerves, though.”

            Jon nodded, still hovering, as Martin got up slowly, wiping off his face with his sleeve. “Do you—need anything from me?” he asked haltingly, and there was a strange note in his voice that he didn’t recognize, a kind of stentorian crispness that was quite wrong for what was supposed to be a gentle inquiry.

            “Right now a hug would be great,” Martin blurted, and then sucked in his breath. “Um. I didn’t mean to say that.”

            Jon felt the hair prickling on the back of his neck, and the room shifted. The door bumped into his head. “Shit,” he said softly. “Shit, did I—”

            “Jon, it’s all right, I don’t really mind, I mean. Ha. Telling someone you want a hug isn’t exactly a deep, dark revelation or anything.”

            “I didn’t know I could—” Jon squeezed his eyes shut, the word _monster_ beating at the backs of his eyelids. “I don’t know how I—” He put a hand to his forehead and pressed it back, pressed it all back. Martin didn’t need to deal with this, not now. Somehow, he got himself to open his arms. “You wanted a hug, right?”

            Gingerly, Martin nodded, face scrunched up. “I mean—if you’re okay with that?” he squeaked.

            “Oh, Martin,” Jon sighed. “Just come here. I don’t think there’s much point in trying to keep up boss/subordinate distinctions anymore.”

            “Thanks,” Martin murmured. “That’s not quite what I—but thanks.”

            He took a step forward and rested himself against Jon, tucking his head beneath Jon’s chin, arms resting gingerly on Jon’s back. Jon curled an arm around his shoulders and rested a hand lightly on his head. His hair was thin and soft, almost a little silky. It felt—nice.

            They stood like that for a few minutes before Martin gave an embarrassed cough and pulled back. “So—maybe we should head back to bed?” he suggested, and Jon found himself nodding jerkily. He could hardly say, “I wouldn’t mind staying like that all night.” Martin had wanted a hug, not a limpet.

            But once they’d slipped back into the airbed, Jon found himself reaching across and tentatively laying a hand on Martin’s arm. Martin went briefly very stiff, and then relaxed.

            “Is this all right?” Jon asked.           

            “Y-Yeah. It’s—fine.”

            The feel of Martin’s warm, living flesh beneath Jon’s palm made it oddly easy to slip back into sleep, and he slept the rest of the night through without nightmares.


	3. On Shabbat Evening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon is told in no uncertain terms to stop trying to go it alone.

             “There’s no doubt in my mind that when the Unknowing begins, one of the dancers will be wearing his face.” Jon sat back, letting the echoes of the statement wash over him, along with the implications, but before he could gather his thoughts together, the annoying creak of the door announced Martin’s entrance.

            “Jon.”

            Jon sighed. “Could this wait a bit?”

            Martin had—of course—a cup of tea in one hand, and he gave Jon a glare. “Georgie deserves to know,” he said, setting the tea down hard enough that a little of it slopped over the edge of the cup. Which probably meant he was quite upset.

            “It’s not safe,” Jon said automatically.

            “Neither is you trying to do this alone,” Martin countered.

            “Martin, I’ll be fine, I’m…” Jon’s throat felt uncomfortably tight, the words squeezed out with an effort. “I don’t want anyone else to become what—I’m becoming.”

            Martin laughed roughly. “God, you and your bloody martyr complex, Jon.”

            Jon blinked at him slowly. “What?” Martin sounded almost _angry_. Martin didn’t really— _get_ angry. Not with anyone who wasn’t himself, anyway.

            “You can get magically get answers to questions. Spoooooky,” Martin growled.

            “I took away your _will_ —”

            “Accidentally, in the middle of the night, when we were both going off the rails with nightmares, sure sounds like you’re the worst person in existence.”

            “The point is that ‘person’ is becoming less and less of an apt—”

            Martin groaned. “Spare me, Jon! You’re not a monster, you’ve got a very long way to go before you _become_ a monster, and d’you know what happens when you don’t ask for help? You get yourself nearly killed by a—a _thing_ that ate Sasha months ago! And—” Martin paused, flushing an ugly red beneath his freckles. “Do you think it would be better if you just disappeared? Is that it? Are you such an idiot that you think it’d hurt _less_ that way?”

            “I don’t want to hurt you!”

            “That’s not your choice to make!” They glared at each other over the table, and Jon, unaccountably, found himself wanting to look away. He didn’t, but he did finally sigh and nod minutely.

            “All right. I’ll tell her.”

            “Good.”

            “And when she throws us both out for being completely around the bend, I hope you have the money to get a hotel room.”

            Martin snorted, but the tension started to drain from his shoulders. “Yeah, sure. And drink your tea.”

~

            The two statements Jon had done today had left him feeling strange. Drained, emotionally and physically, but also wired, as if he’d had one too many cups of coffee or a cigarette after days without one. Georgie sat slumped across the table from the recorder and Martin was just coming back in, this time with scones, jam, and clotted cream, as well as a teapot. He had a smudge of something white on his nose.

            “Is food your solution to _everything_?” Jon asked tiredly, but Martin didn’t seem to take offense.

            “Kind of, I guess? Back before my mum got sick she used to make really elaborate home-cooked meals every Friday night, and good food just takes me back and makes me feel safe, you know?”

            Jon had never really thought about the idea of family that way. Wasn’t certain if he’d ever felt— _safe_ , like that. He and his grandmother hadn’t hated each other, but there had been little love lost between them. Of course intellectually he knew his experiences were atypical, but something about the aching fondness in Martin’s voice made him go quiet and say, “Well…thanks.”

            For a few minutes they ate in silence, and then Martin looked up and said, “So what are we going to do about this ritual, then?”

            Frowning, Jon stared down at his tea and played absently with his partially-eaten scone, crumbling at a corner of it with his fingers. “I was thinking I might go track down this Jude Perry person.”

            “Um, what? No. Jon. No. You can’t just go after a member of the Lightless Flame cult like that.”

            “Well, what would you have me do, then? Nothing? Let our world—”

            “Because you getting burned to death sounds so extremely helpful,” Martin shot back. “You can’t just…I mean, okay, you might be able to get answers, but I can’t imagine you’d live long enough to use them.”

            “Thank you for that vote of confidence, Martin,” Jon said, although there was little bite in his voice.

            “Jon…” Georgie put in. “I don’t think that’s aimed at your abilities in particular.”

            “It’s not,” Martin mumbled, turning his cup of tea around and around between his hands. “It’s just, I mean. Look at the last couple of times we’ve dealt with stuff like this? Jane Prentiss took an entire institute full of fire extinguishers to deal with. You can’t just…just go ask someone like _that_ without more information. More research.”

            “Where am I supposed to _do_ more research? It’s not as if I can just walk back into the Institute and say ‘oh hello Elias, I know I was fired for murder but I was hoping to have a look, and by the way, did you frame me?’”

            Martin stared down at the table, sniffed, pushed a scone idly around in his cup of tea. “I mean. We could sneak in?”

            “Don’t be—” Jon cut himself off. Leitner had remained undetected in the tunnels beneath the Archives for years. Admittedly, he had been beaten to death almost as soon as he had dared emerge, a memory Jon still instinctively shied away from, but if they could get into the Archives undetected, even for a brief amount of time—well. Any information was better than none, and the thought of being surrounded by statements made Jon’s stomach tighten and brought heat to his cheeks. He swallowed. He wasn’t sure he liked the strange longing that had sprung up in his heart. Wasn’t sure how safe it was. How _human_ it was. But he wasn’t sure what good trying to resist it at this point was either. “All right,” he said, nipping at his bottom lip thoughtfully. “We go to the Archives. But we’re _careful_. If there is any indication that someone’s going to catch us there, we leave right away. Right away.”

            “Don’t worry,” Martin said with a shudder. “I don’t want to, um, be beaten to death any more than either of you do.”

            “I should think not,” Georgie put in, although Jon knew—they all knew—that she couldn’t possibly be afraid.

~

            The following day was Friday. Another statement arrived for Jon, but he elected to ignore it, preferring to conserve his energy for whatever they might find in the Archives that night. Instead, he read his way steadily through every book Georgie had in her flat. It was a rather eclectic collection, but he didn’t care. The books carried him away from a world of monsters and into other, happier places. He was vaguely aware of Martin coming in and out, occasionally with a snack, sometimes to tweak open the curtains to improve the light levels. At one point he sat down on the couch beside Jon and read something as well.

            The light was beginning to wane outside when Martin came back in. “Have you seen Georgie?” he asked. Jon shook his head vaguely.

            “Damn,” Martin said, and went out again. A few minutes later, Jon heard voices in the hallway, and Georgie and Martin came back into the room.

            “All right, if you like,” Georgie was saying.

            “I could do it myself,” Martin replied. “But it’s really your flat, even if it’s not, um, not your faith? I just…” he held his hands up. “I haven’t done this in a long time, and I’m not actually sure which would be the right way to go about it but, um. I’d just feel better if the candles got lit and the blessing got said? It—I—I don’t know, I mean, I know it’s funny to cling to s-something like this after everything, but—”

            “Martin, I don’t mind,” Georgie cut in, and Jon looked up, wondering what they were talking about.

            Martin was just setting two large candles in candleholders up in front of the window. “Hi, Jon,” he said cheerfully. Part of it was probably nerves, Jon decided, but there was still a surprising amount of cheer being exuded from his friend.

            “Erm, hi,” he replied. “What’s going on?”

            “Sundown’s in twenty minutes,” Martin explained. “And Georgie kindly agreed to light the Shabbat candles for me.”

            It took Jon a few seconds to process this. “Wait,” he said slowly. “You’re Jewish?”

            Martin blinked back. “Um,” he said. “Y-yeah? I mean I’m not, um, super observant, but, uh…I do usually take Yom Kippur and Hanukkah and Passover off? For…um. The entire time you’ve known me?”

            “Oh,” said Jon. “I—er—sorry.”

            “Martin isn’t the only person who isn’t observant,” Georgie muttered, just loud enough to be heard. Jon shot her a glare. Martin was drooping a little, and he felt an unexpected pang of guilt.

            “Just because I don’t notice dates doesn’t mean I don’t care about Martin,” he snapped back at Georgie, hunching forward and very unsure as to whether that was what he ought to be saying. Martin did seem to relax a little at that, and he gestured to Georgie, who gave him a smile and stepped forward with a match, scratching it against the side of the box so that it flared to light.

            An oddly soft light, Jon considered as Martin stepped forward as well, half-reciting and half-singing in a quavering voice, “ _Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha_ _-_ _olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat._ ” The shadows flickered about him as he intoned the prayer, almost, Jon thought in confusion, almost _away_ , although perhaps that was just the way the candles had been lit.

            “Thanks,” Martin said softly to Georgie as she blew out the match. For a long moment, he stood in front of the candles, his head bowed, breathing in and out. Jon watched him, watched the way the light curled in around the edges of his silhouette, the way it seemed to hold him gently and at the same time create the odd illusion that it came _from_ him, that Martin himself was shining with a warm, welcoming glow, that—Jon shook his head, and the strange impression diminished, and there was just Martin, shaking his head as well and laughing his awkward, nervous laugh. “Oh, I made omelettes for dinner,” he said.

            “Thanks,” said Jon.

~

            The tunnels were quiet and still and empty. The occasional worm husk still made a prickling, itching sensation crawl across Jon’s scars, but overall—strangely—the tunnels themselves seemed to have lost their dread. There was no longer anyone to move them about beneath Jon’s feet, true, but it wasn’t that, exactly. They simply seemed smaller, more ordinary. Jon shook his head. His brain was probably playing tricks on him again. God knew it did so often enough these days.

            The Archives themselves were dark, and as soon as they entered, the hair prickled on the back of Jon’s neck. The Eye, watching. At least, Jon hoped it was the Eye and not Elias. “All right,” he said into the waiting silence. “We need to be quick and directed about this. We need to find any statement that mentions rituals. I’ll read if we find any. You two, just search and give me anything you find.”

            It was surreal, being back in the Archives like this. Sitting at the familiar desk, but with the overhead lights off, with only the light of torches to see by—bright enough, certainly, but focused. Too focused. Focused enough for reading a statement, but _finding_ one—well, the Archive isn’t any more well-organized than it used to be.

            Jon flipped through page after page of statements, reading just enough to ascertain relevance or irrelevance. Most of what he ascertained was, in fact, irrelevance. He found one or two scattered references to what might constitute rituals. One full statement from about forty years ago mentioned what seemed to be a failed attempt at instantiating the Dark, but the statement giver had been a child, so it was difficult to glean which details of the statement had actually contributed to the botching of the ritual. Had it been the fact that the girl had been allowed to keep her teddy bear that had fought off the Dark? It seemed an absurd hypothesis, but—Jon just didn’t know.

            “I think I have something,” Georgie said suddenly. Jon looked up, letting his voice die away, but not bothering to turn off the recorder. “Here.” She was making her way across the room when Jon felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck again. He was hardly even surprised when all three of them heard footsteps outside of the door.

            “Take it and go,” Jon hissed. “We need to leave. That’s—”

            The door swung open, and harsh white light spilled in around the figure silhouetted there. Even with nothing else to go on, Elias’s curly hair was clearly outlined.

            “Go,” Jon said, scrambling for the tunnels. “Go, go, _go_!”

            He heard a crash, heard Martin yelp, heard Georgie cry, “I’ve got you!” Then pounding footsteps, and then he was at the back and running for the trapdoor where they’d come in, waiting for the overhead lights to be switched on, waiting for something, anything, other than the sound of Elias’s low, delighted laughter.


	4. Light and Heat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Georgie and Martin go out drinking and there is a lot of kidnapping.

             It was three am by the time they made it back to Georgie’s flat. Martin felt sick to his stomach with exhaustion and adrenaline. He had no idea how they hadn’t been caught. He had tripped over what felt like every piece of furniture between himself and the exit, and he could tell from the sore spots studding his torso, hips, and legs that he was pretty bruised up.

            As soon as the three of them trudged into the kitchen, Jon fumbled his tape recorder out of the bag. “Jon.” Martin grabbed his wrist. “Sleep first, c’mon.”

            A pained expression flitted across Jon’s face, and his hand tightened about the recorder, but after a moment he exhaled and set it carefully on the table. “All right. I suppose so.”

            They didn’t bother to brush their teeth or change. Jon took off his jacket, Martin kicked off his trousers, and they both collapsed into the bed. The last thing Martin felt before sleep claimed him was the comfortable weight of Jon’s thin-fingered hand on his shoulder.

            The ache in his head woke him to bright sunlight spearing through the curtains they hadn’t remembered to close. Jon was still asleep. Martin rolled over, groaning, and stumbled out into the other room. The candles, half-melted, still stood in front of the window, and Georgie, yawning, was slumped over her laptop in the kitchen with a very strong-smelling cup of black coffee in front of her.

            “Have you looked at the statement yet?” Martin asked her, and she shook her head.

            “Just woke up,” she mumbled into her mug. She opened her mouth to say something else, but a strong rapping on the door interrupted her before the conversation could continue. “Ugh,” Georgie said, instead of whatever she had been going to say. “I swear if my mail got delivered downstairs again…” She pushed herself upright. “There’s more coffee if you want it, and we still have some digestives, I think.” Martin headed for the teapot and the biscuit tin as Georgie went out to answer the door.

            Humming softly to himself, he faintly heard the sound of the door opening, and then the sound of low, angry voices. The neighbor must not be very happy about getting Georgie’s mail delivered to the wrong address again. The door creaked and two pairs of footsteps headed down the hallway. Towards the spare bedroom.

            Frowning, Martin stuck his head out of the kitchen and saw a tall figure behind Georgie’s, hand curled around—the gasp dropped out of Martin’s lips before he could call it back, and the woman turned immediately. It was Detective Tonner, and she had a gun in her hand pointed at Georgie.

            “Come out of there,” she said. “Blackwood. What are _you_ doing here?”

            “I—I,” said Martin, trying to think quickly and failing. “Making a cup of tea?” he finally tried.

            “Right, well, it doesn’t matter. Just come along quietly so I don’t have to shoot your friend.”

            “What are you—”

            “No questions,” Tonner said, in a tone of voice that suggested very unpleasant things would happen if any were asked. Martin shut up and trailed after them. “Open the door,” Tonner told Georgie, and she complied. “Go in and wake him up.”

            A moment later, Jon’s voice was swearing. Never at his best in the morning, Martin thought, somewhat hysterically. Then Jon stumbled out of the room, his hair a rumpled mess, the top three buttons of his shirt undone. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

            “Shut up,” Tonner told him. “Now march. The two of you can stay here.”

            “No,” Martin said immediately. “No, you’re n-not, you’re not taking Jon without me.”

            “Martin—” Jon tried to say, and Tonner shoved the gun against his forehead with a slamming noise. Jon went quiet with a hiss of pain. “Shut up. Fine. Just the two of you then. Do anything funny and I shoot the Archivist in the head.”

            The car ride was tense and horrible. Martin kept looking for a chance to jump out and not finding one. At his side, Jon had his eyes shut, and his breathing was wobbly. Periodic shivers ran down his spine. Martin wasn’t sure how well he was breathing himself.

            When they’d driven for about fifteen minutes, Tonner brought the car to a screeching halt, reached back, and grabbed Jon’s shoulder, yanking him forward to press the gun into his forehead again. “Get out and don’t even think about running,” she said roughly, and Martin complied immediately, stumbling out of the door onto a white gravel path that hurt his feet. It took him a moment to realize the reason was that he wasn’t wearing shoes.

            After a moment, Jon joined him, breathing heavily as if he’d been running. “Move it,” Tonner told them, and Martin realized they were being directed up a shallow slope towards an isolated area that couldn’t be seen from the road. He didn’t have a good feeling about this. Not at all. Jon shot him an agonized look, and Martin realized he didn’t think he’d ever seen his friend so frightened before.

            As they reached the crest of the slope, Jon turned to face Detective Tonner. “Are—are you going to kill us?” he asked.

            Tonner’s face remained horrifyingly blank. “I only kill monsters,” she said.

            “Then _why_ —”

            “Shut up and stop asking questions or I’ll make an exception,” she gritted out, turning the gun on Martin, who swallowed hard. Jon’s mouth slammed shut. “Better. Kneel down.”

            “Please don’t shoot me,” Jon gabbled out as he went to his knees. “I really—I don’t—please—”

            “L-l-leave him alone.” Martin knelt with him, cold and afraid, reaching out for Jon’s hand, his heart pounding so horribly hard he thought it might burst out of his chest. “What k-kind of detective _are_ you?”

            “The kind who kills monsters, I told you.” She walked forward, placing the gun against Jon’s forehead. Jon shut his eyes. Martin could hear his terrified, tearing breaths, and he was sure it was all over, they were both dead. He clutched at Jon’s hand, and Jon squeezed back, and Hebrew spilled from Martin’s lips, the old familiar prayer, the only thing left to him in this extremis, “ _Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad,_ ” over and over again, growing faster and faster.

            “What are you saying?” Tonner demanded, stepping backwards. “What are you saying, I can’t—” The sun chose that moment to flicker out from behind the clouds, and for an instant, she raised a hand to shield her eyes, pointing the gun towards the earth.

            “Daisy,” said another voice. “Daisy, don’t.”

~

            “I hate Elias,” Jon said morosely, staring down at the table in front of him. His hands were clutched tight around his tape recorder, the pain of the corners cutting into his palm faintly comforting. “I feel dirty.”

            “At least he confessed?” Martin shoved yet another cup of tea at Jon, apparently in lieu of having anything better to do.           

            “Oh, yes,” Jon agreed bitterly. “Confessed to two murders, refused to tell me anything _useful_ , practically _advertised_ that he was—was—and continued to retain the upper hand despite all of that.”

            “Okay, admittedly, it—hasn’t been a great day,” Martin agreed, and now several biscuits had joined the cup of tea.

            Jon shut his eyes, running his fingers across the familiar lines of his tape recorder, the smooth plastic housing of the tape itself. “Just—just. Leave me alone. I need—time to myself.”

            “Are you sure you should—”

            “Martin, for god’s sake—” Jon reined himself in, closing his lips around anything especially nasty. “Just. Please.”

            “Okay, yeah. Sure. Uh, Georgie said maybe we’d like to go out for drinks, but if you don’t want to come, I’ll just. Yeah.”

            “Thank you.”

            “And if you want me for anything—”

            “I will call. I am capable of working a telephone,” Jon gritted out.

            “Sorry,” Martin said meekly, and Jon waited until he and Georgie had left, and then he sighed and put his forehead down onto the table. He had a statement he needed to read. There was no point in dwelling on Elias Bouchard and two murders and the inescapable, creeping feeling of being trapped in a vast web from which there was no escape.

            Wrinkling his nose, Jon took another few deep breaths and opened his eyes. The statement lay across the table, cream-white paper against the red tablecloth. Jon looked down at the biscuits, sighed, and stuffed one into his mouth before hooking the paper across the table.

 

[CLICK]

 

            Statement by an unknown person, regarding the perversion of a sacred ritual. When the original statement was given is unknown but evidently it was an extremely long time ago, as records indicate Jonah Magnus obtained a version of it from a prior Archive, which had itself done the same. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

 

            We are all lost. Our world is fallen to fear, and there is no bringing it back. What have we done?

~

            It was quite a pleasant haze, Martin thought, the alcohol and the warm lights of the bar and Georgie sitting beside him in a companionable sort of way. It wasn’t always easy for him to strike up a conversation, but Georgie seemed—well—normal enough, at least given the level of normal Martin handled these days, and the alcohol helped. Three beers was quite enough to make Martin feel sociable.

            “So’ve you known Jon for long?” he asked, sipping at his fourth. It wasn’t bad beer, really, although he’d always felt drinking beer was a bit weird because it tasted like drinking sour bread.

            “Since uni or so.” Georgie gave him a smile. “Actually, we sort of—well, we had a thing for a while.”

            “O-Oh.” Martin felt his stomach drop. “So…he’s straight, then.” Confirmation of something Martin had wondered for years. Something he’d never really wanted to confirm, because even a sliver of hope was better than none.

            “No idea,” Georgie confessed. “Jon’s not terrifically big on labels. Pretty sure he dated a guy at least once, though.” And Martin felt like he could breathe again, even though if Jon had ever had any interest in him, surely, surely he would have said something by now. _Just like you have?_ a little voice inside his head prodded. Besides, Jon was pretty oblivious about that kind of thing.

            “Good to know,” Martin replied, then realized, with horror, what he’d said. “Oh—oh shit, I—I ehm—”

            Georgie blew out a long, sympathetic breath. “How long?” she asked.

            “Um, um, a few years, I think,” Martin confessed, still feeling the heat burning in his cheeks, but at least comforted by her reaction.

            “Ooof. God. I am _sorry_ ,” she told him, heartfelt. “Jon hasn’t got a clue, has he?”

            Taking a longer pull of his beer, Martin shook his head, staring down at the wood grain of the bar. “I really doubt it. I don’t think he even knows that all he has to do is ask me to do something and I’ll do it. I’d probably die for him. Nearly did, a couple times? I think.” He frowned. “Although—I also think he’s been kind of deliberately pushing me away for a while now. He thought it would be safer.”

            Georgie gave a rueful laugh. “Yeah, sounds like Jon. He never did have a good sense for how much he should take on by himself. Never seemed to know to ask for help.”

            “It’s so stupid!” Martin said fiercely, waving his beer. “He’s so stupid. He’s such an idiot.”

            “That is a true description of Jonathan Sims, yeah,” Georgie agreed.

            “Ugh,” Martin said, morosely. The heat of the alcohol in him had turned unpleasant. He was sweating a little, and he pressed the cool of his glass into his forehead. It helped a little. Not enough. “It’s not going to go away,” he said, and he suddenly wasn’t sure if he was talking to Georgie or to Jonathan. “I thought for a while, you know, unrequited crush, they _do_ go away, but it’s not like that with him. It’s more than a crush.”

            Georgie made an appropriate sympathetic noise, but Martin was pressing a hand into his hot forehead now, wondering what was making him feel so decidedly peculiar. He was almost not surprised when someone said brightly from behind him, “Hello, Martin Blackwood, isn’t it? We’d very much like it if you would come with us.”

            _Oh shit,_ Martin considered saying, because there was something in that tone, some strange underlying note of sizzling, devouring fire, that told him the person speaking was probably not entirely human. In the end, he just looked up blearily and found that the person speaking to him had her hand raised, hovering over Georgie’s head, as if she were about to touch her. A frantic blur of statements about flesh boiling and cooking rose up in his mind. “Yeah,” he stammered. “Yeah, all right, just don’t—please don’t hurt her.”

            “Does she mean a lot to you?” asked the woman, her smile widening further, and Martin swallowed, coming to a halt, not knowing what to say. “Oh, never mind, there’s no time.” She jerked her head towards the exit. “Come along, then.”


	5. Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Lightless Flame has a bone to pick with Martin.

            Jon sighed and sat back, his thoughts whirling. The statement contained nothing definitive, certainly nothing definitively useful for stopping the Unknowing. And yet—there were some suggestive elements about it that made him wonder, that outlined a world very different from the one in which they lived. Even the idea of it made his stomach drop and his head whirl. He wanted more statements like this; he wanted a more complete version of this one, which had been extremely fragmentary. The shape of it burned inside him. Part of him wanted to tell Martin and Georgie; another part wanted to swallow the secret and let it grow inside him, feed it on whatever knowledge he could gather together along the same lines, let it swell and grow limbs and a head and eyes—

            Jon shook his head, shuddering a little at the strange image. The important thing was to figure out what to do _next_. Presumably after everything that had happened, they could now once again use the resources of the Archives to figure out an appropriate response to the potentially growing threat of an imminent apocalypse. Of the literal sort, Jon supposed, not so much the end of the world as the lifting of a veil—or the twisting of it, at any rate.

            Of course, with Georgie and Martin out drinking, probably till all hours, there wasn’t much he could do unless he chose to make his way back to the Archives by himself, and he wasn’t certain he felt up to that after the day he’d had. His head throbbed faintly, and he rubbed at a tender spot he suspected was starting to bruise. Taking a sip of his now ice-cold tea, he sighed and pushed back the chair. Time for bed, then. At least he’d be well-rested tomorrow.

            He heard the sound of the door opening but there was no accompanying murmur of voices, and Jon didn’t know if it was that or if it was the distinct sound of only one set of footfalls, but he was suddenly very awake. Heart thumping in his chest, he slipped out of his chair and put the table between himself and the door.

            “Jon!” Georgie’s voice called—oh god, _was_ it Georgie’s voice? What if she’d been replaced? What if it was Not Georgie? How would he even know? No—no, there was the statement she’d given, he could compare— “Jon!”

            The kitchen door was flying open before Jon could figure out his next movie, before he could do anything more than retreat further and grab a rolling pin from Georgie’s dish-drying rack as an impromptu weapon. Better than nothing, after all.

            Georgie tumbled through the door, and a distinct smell of burning followed her, but no Martin. She barely even looked at the rolling pin in Jon’s hand. “Jude Perry—” she gasped. “I’m sure that’s who it was—she took Martin. She took him, I couldn’t—oh, god, Jon, I’m sorry.”

            It took a long moment for Jon to parse his way through this. When he did, he sank back against the sink and shut his eyes. Martin. _Martin_. No.

~

            Martin’s throat was dry, his head pounding and whirling with the smell of smoke and the fug of incense. Instinctively, he tried to reach for Jon, but he couldn’t. His hand wouldn’t move. The tips of his fingers were tingling slightly, and there was an intense aching pressure against both wrists.

            “You awake?” asked a bored voice. Martin struggled to open his eyes. It took a minute or two but eventually the lids managed to peel themselves up. His eyes were dry and painful, and grains of fine sleep-sand were trapped beneath the lids. He blinked his eyes, trying to clear them. Wherever he was, he couldn’t see much—the lights were dim and smoky red—but he could tell he was in a relatively large room, poorly furnished, with no apparent signs of an exterior window. Oh, and he was tied to a chair. There was also that.

            He opened his mouth and croaked, “Water.”

            “Oh, good, you are,” said the voice. “I’ll get Jude.”

            “Water,” Martin tried again. “Please.” His captor ignored him, and he saw a dim, indistinct figure rise and move toward the exit. The door closed behind them. After what seemed like an eternity, the door opened again, and the woman who had taken Martin from the pub entered. She was short and heavy-set, but most of what Martin noticed about her was the smear of bright orange lipstick that she wore, and the confident way she carried herself.

            “Martin Blackwood,” she said slowly, stopping in front of his chair. Martin could feel a heat radiating off her in slow waves, not like the welcoming heat of the sun but more like an oven, opened and waiting to consume whatever was put inside of it. “Until recently an archival assistant at the Magnus Institute. What are you?”

            “Wh-What?” Martin managed to stammer out. “I—what? I don’t know what you mean?”

            Jude Perry reached out and grabbed his chin between her fingers. They were unnaturally hot as well, so hot for an instant that Martin thought his skin would blister beneath him, and then the sensation faded to something acutely uncomfortable but still bearable. “You should be screaming right now,” Perry said matter-of-factly. She looked at someone behind her. “Bring me a candle.”

            Martin struggled, weakly and ineffectually, for a minute, before giving up. He couldn’t even get her to let go of his face. The smell of smoke was almost overwhelming.

            “All right,” the woman in front of him said. “Let’s try this.” Martin heard the skritching sound of a match being struck, and a bright light sprang up in her hand. She went around behind him, and he felt the brush of her fingers across the back of his neck for a moment, and then pain—hot, sharp, horrible—shot up his arm from the back of his hand. He screamed and tried to pull away, but he couldn’t. All he managed to do was rock the chair back and forth slightly.

            “Huh.” The heat moved away, and the pain settled into a horrible white ache, leaving Martin limp and trembling. “So you do burn. What the hell?” She stalked back out in front of him. “Let’s try this again. What are you?”

            “I d-don’t know what you’re t-t-talking about!” Martin protested. He was sweating hard, but he felt almost feverish.

            “That’s not useful,” Perry told him flatly, and she hit him across the face, snapping his head to the side. “You’re not wax. A candle burns you, but my hand doesn’t. That’s no trick of the Eye’s. So. Who are you sworn to?”

            “I’m n-n-not sworn to anyone.” What was she saying? That he wasn’t human anymore? He was tied to the Archive, he knew that. He knew Jon worried about losing his humanity to it, but Martin was pretty sure they were both as human as ever. Jon had _always_ been obsessive and morose. He hadn’t actually demonstrably _changed_ , even if he could occasionally force people to answer his questions these days. And Martin—he didn’t even have that. Except now someone was telling him he did have—something. Something he didn’t understand.

            Jude Perry was connected to the cult of the Lightless Flame, he knew that, but—what was he missing? Martin could have cried with frustration, because none of it made _sense_ , and why had she kidnapped him, anyway?

            “You’re obviously not human,” Perry said bluntly, and Martin flinched as if she’d hit him again. “You’re like…” She held up the candle. As Martin watched, confused, miserable, it flared up, turning from yellow to white, stripping the shadows from Perry’s face, laying the room bare with a strangely cool bright light. “But you burn,” Perry said softly. “You do _burn_ …” She held the candle up towards his face, and Martin strained backwards, away. Oddly, he couldn’t feel the heat of it now, but it was the principle of the thing.

            Perry made a disgusted noise and set the candle down on the ground. Raising a foot, she brought it down, and Martin flinched, staring down at the ruin of wax and shattered ceramic beneath her foot. She ground her foot into it, once, twice, and then she produced the box of matches again, her smile growing wider and wider as she struck the next match and held it out over Martin’s lap.


	6. Knives and Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon disapproves of the actions of the Lightless Flame. Violently.

            The book was just where Jon had known it would be. For the first time, he didn’t have mixed feelings about the new powers that were blossoming inside him. Maybe he was turning into a monster. He would lose himself entirely—happily, even—if it meant the world still had a Martin in it. He reached out, had nearly laid a hand on it, when a crisp, dry voice spoke from the doorway, “Jon, really. I don’t think you should be taking that out of Artefact Storage.”

            He turned to see Elias there. “Don’t you?” he asked coolly. “I rather think I should.”

            “Jon.” Elias’s words were warning now. “I recognize that you’re upset, but this is a time for levelheadedness, not stealing Leitners—” his eyes flicked to the volume in Jon’s hand. “—Leitners of excessive violence, in fact.”

            “Elias, you like it when I ask you things,” Jon said pleasantly. “How would you like me to ask for your darkest secret and drag it out of you screaming?”

            Blink. Elias wasn’t afraid, precisely, but he did seem a bit taken aback. “Erm,” he said. “Are you feeling quite well, Archivist?”

            There was a sort of thrumming beneath Jon’s skin. He knew part of it was due to contact with the Leitner, though he hadn’t even opened the thing yet and he did retain enough self-preservation to plan on some level of care when he did. The rest—well. “No,” he said to Elias. “No, I don’t think I _am_ feeling quite well, thanks, Elias, something to do with spending the past few weeks dodging police officers and hiding in my ex’s flat with the only _respite_ from a set of _mounting horrors spewing from my own mouth_ being the cups of tea that Martin has kindly been putting at my elbows every few hours, and now Martin is _gone_ , and I am not letting you or anyone or anything else stop me from getting him _back_!”

            There was a long pause. Elias cleared his throat. “While I cannot say I feel this is the best use of your talents, I appreciate that at least you _are_ using them now,” he finally said icily. “All right, go then. I expect you to bring the Leitner back in good condition, at least.”

            “Of course, Elias, I’ll make sure the bloody _book_ comes back in pristine condition, ignoring the fact it could slice either one of us to ribbons with ease.”           

            “We're going to be working on your priorities when you get back,” Elias told him, but by then Jon was already out the door and running down the hall.

            He knew approximately where Martin was by the time he was out of the Institute, and that made it quite easy to summon a taxi so that he could get there while focusing on getting the knowledge of how to use this particular Leitner without hurting Martin or himself. _Lamb to the Slaughter_ , it was called. He didn’t think he’d read the statement dealing with this particular volume, but when he concentrated, he was able to call it to mind just fine. Just what he needed.

            The taxi dropped him off at an intersection he vaguely recognized, but he was somewhat beyond petty human concerns such as street names. He found the door that he knew he needed, walked up to it, and knocked, once, twice, three times.

            The person who answered was a member of the Lightless Flame, but they were still mostly human. “Where is Martin?” the Archivist demanded, the compulsion harsh as a whip lacing each word. He saw the person’s eyes bulge as they briefly tried to fight it and took some pleasure in the way the answer was choked out of them. As he pushed past them, he opened the book in his hand and glanced briefly at a single page, then smiled to himself at the gurgling sound of someone choking on their own blood as he made his way down the hallway.

            Several people attempted to stop him. Quite a number of them used guns, but the Archivist found that it was surprisingly easy to know where he needed to step to avoid such clumsy attacks. At the end of the hallway was a Flame, who tried to burn him. The Archivist paused and looked at it, smiling. “What could I tell you that would make your fire go out?” he asked softly, and again he wrapped the words with that inescapable compulsion.

            When he reached the door beyond, the Archivist paused to know who was inside. One Flame and a number of people. Martin, in the center, bound and feverish. When the Archivist tried to know anything else about him, though, he found he could not; when he tried he staggered back, breathing hard, his skin searing, lungs straining and burning. Martin was breathing, though, he knew that much. Breathing, bound, feverish, trapped.

            The Archivist opened the book in his hands and read the first paragraph on the seventh page and the third paragraph on the fourteenth. Then he put his hand on the doorknob.

~

            “Jon— _Jon_ —” There was blood. Quite a lot of blood. Someone was making a pained, animalistic noise. “Jon. That’s—I think that’s enough.” Someone’s fingers were underneath his shoe. Jon ground his heel down once more for good measure, took a long deep breath, straightened his jacket and looked up to meet Martin’s eyes, wide and alive beneath his disheveled hair. “You’re all right, Martin?”

            A jerky nod. “I think so.”

            There was a bruise blooming beneath his right eye, an ugly green-purple. Absently, Jon kicked the woman on the floor in front of him. It was a shame his shoe wasn’t metal-tipped, but there was still a satisfying impact and another breathy gasp. Still. First things first. No one was left in any condition to stop him as he strode across the room, took a knife out of his pocket, and began to carefully saw through the ropes still binding Martin’s wrists. Martin hissed in slight pain, and Jon had to force himself to be even more careful, but after a moment the rope parted, falling to Martin’s knees. Jon took Martin’s hands and turned them over gently, cataloguing the repeated weals that wound around and just beneath his fragile wristbones, noting for later infliction the two broken nails and the scrape across the second and third of his right knuckles.

            “Really,” Martin said, taking his hands back before Jon could inspect the left one. “I’m a bit scuffed up, but I think that’s it.”

            There was no time. More members of the cult might show up at any moment. Jon could use _Lamb_ again, but it was more important to get Martin out of here. He elected not to think about what Martin might think of him now. With the blood spattered all over the room, the smell of smoke mingling with the coppery smell of blood and something else, sweet-sour and rank. It had been necessary, deserved, but—would Martin understand that? It didn’t matter. What mattered was helping Martin to his feet, sliding an arm beneath his shoulder, and getting him up.

            “Your glasses?” Martin was blinking at him myopically, his eyes ever-so-slightly unfocused.

            “Dunno,” Martin replied tiredly. “I woke up without them. I think I have a spare pair at my flat, somewhere. I suppose I can go back now.”

            “I’m getting you back to Georgie’s first. I’d rather—you shouldn’t be alone.”

            “All right.” Martin managed a smile. “I’m okay, though. Really.”

            “Shut up, Martin,” Jon told him roughly, and he didn’t take his arm away from beneath Martin’s waist, stooping so he could help the shorter man along more easily.

            The taxi was still waiting outside as Jon had instructed. So little time had passed. Despite the carnage Jon had left, there was very little blood actually clinging to him, although he could feel something sticky leaking from the Leitner over his fingers and onto the leather of the taxi’s interior.

            The ride itself didn’t take particularly long. When they made it back to Georgie’s flat, Jon stuffed the Leitner into a plastic bag, searched out a permanent marker and wrote _DO NOT OPEN_ across the side, then tossed it onto the countertop, where it landed with an audible squelch. Georgie put her head into the kitchen. “Are you—” she started.

            “Could use a cup of tea,” Martin said vacantly. At some point, he’d sat down at the table.

            “Could you make one?” Jon asked. “Martin, come with me.”

            “Jon…”

            “Please.”

            “All right.” Shakily, Martin got to his feet again, and Jon swallowed, his throat working oddly, as he put a hand on Martin’s shoulder and steered him out of the kitchen, down the hallway, back to the guest bedroom. “Take off your clothes,” he said without preamble as soon as the door shut behind them.

~

            “Um,” said Martin, wondering if he’d heard properly. “What? Jon—what?”

            “I don’t—I don’t—I thought by isolating myself I’d be protecting you, but I—I—I—” Jon took a deep, shaky breath. “Please, Martin. I just need to _know_ that you’re all right.”

            “Erm, well.” Martin could feel the heat traveling up the back of his head. “Do…do I _really_ need to be naked for that?”

            “It would help, yeah.” Jon looked down at his hands. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, I just…it would just…”

            Martin licked his lips. “You really don’t get why this is awkward, do you?”

            “Would it help if I took off my clothes as well?” He put a hand on the top button of his shirt collar.

            “Oh, _G-d_ , Jon. No, don’t, look, I’ll—if it’ll make you feel better.” This felt _weird_ , Martin thought, but the desperate way Jon was tapping his fingers against the windowsill, the way he was barely controlling his breathing—Martin swallowed hard and began to slowly undo the buttons of his shirt. Jon watched him—not avidly—just with an intense concentration that almost equaled the intensity of his questions sometimes. It helped, made it easier, a bit, for Martin to shrug off his shirt with a shuddering breath. He tried very hard not to think about what Jon’s scrutiny was doing to his insides. And at least one bit of his outside.

            No, he definitely wasn’t going to think about how Jon might react to that, Martin thought miserably, and dropped his trousers and bent down to slip off his socks as well. Although the room was rather cold, he was barely shivering as he walked across the room to Jon, who was still watching him with that sharp, intense gaze that sent a shiver down his spine.

            Jon, who took in a deep breath that was almost a sob, rested his hands on Martin’s upper shoulders, and then moved in so close that Martin was almost _certain_ he was about to be kissed, but—no—Jon was just—was just looking at him. First in one eye, then the other. His gaze slid across Martin’s cheek, and Martin, trying desperately not to react in a way that would be deeply inappropriate, said, “Um. Could we sit down?”

            “Oh—oh yeah. Of course. Sure. The bed okay?”

            “Do you do this on purpose?” Martin finally blurted out, because he was painfully hard, and was it really possible for Jon to actually be this thick?

            “Do wha—oh. _Oh_.  Martin, no, I just—shit. Shit, I never meant—” Jon took a half-step back, but he didn’t turn away, as if even now he was half-afraid that Martin would disappear if he stopped looking at him. Which, Martin supposed, wasn’t actually such a hugely surprising concern, when you thought about it. Given, well, everything.

            He sighed. “You know—for somebody who can, um—who’s—basically an avatar of knowledge—you can be incredibly dense,” he said, quietly. “Jon. Ask me.”

            “Ask you—what?”

            “How—h-h-how I feel about you?”

            He saw Jon’s eyes widen, felt his gaze flicker down across him, pausing in his intense scrutiny to get a more holistic look, and Martin thought he could have cried. Jon’s gaze only paused for an instant between his legs—although it was long enough to send a sharp spike of desire through him—and then Jon reached out and took his hand.

            “How do you feel about me, Martin?” he asked, and Martin felt it—the rushing, tingling compulsion, and it was just really very easy to let himself fall into the directive of that voice.

            “I think I probably love you, Jon,” he said softly.

            “How long?”

            “Um. A while now. Quite a while now. Sometime before Jane Prentiss. A—a few years, probably. Actually.”

            “Oh.”

            “Yeah.”

            Jon stood still for a long minute before speaking. “I missed the obvious again, didn’t I?”

            “Yeah, you kind of did. Yeah.” Martin swallowed. “Didn’t think I’d ever have the courage to say that, mind. So, um. Thanks?”

            Running a hand through his graying hair, Jon stood there awkwardly. “I suppose I haven’t really given the matter much though, but—” Another shuddering breath. “Martin, when I thought you might actually—I’m so sorry. I’ve put you through so much, and then I didn’t—I didn’t even—” Three fingers brushed across Martin’s cheekbone, and this time, he let himself turn into the touch and shut his eyes. “I didn’t _see_ ,” Jon said, wretchedly. “I didn’t see about you, and I didn’t—I didn’t see about me, either.”

            Martin’s eyes snapped open. “Wh-What?”

            “Martin, I—don’t know how we’ve both failed to see this, I really don’t. I would have—if you had died—I love you, you’re—And I really, _really_ still want to check you over to make sure you’re all right, but, ehm. I’ve made it awkward too, haven’t I?”

            “I mean.” Martin looked awkwardly down at his erection. “You’re not very big on sex, are you, Jon?”

            “Er—no. Not really. I mean—I don’t mind it? It just isn’t a thing I particularly need or desire or—it’s never really gone along with, um. Affection. For me. But I don’t mind it? I don’t think most people get that. I’ve dated a bit, you know, I’m not a complete—monk. People get weirded out if you don’t _ask_ for sex, and I never notice their hints, so…”

            Jon’s gaze was so intense that for an instant Martin thought he might melt in front of it. “Are—you offering what I think you—?”

            “Like I said, I don’t mind, and I—god, I can’t believe I didn’t realize what you meant to me. I want you to have what you want from me, Martin. What—whatever you want from me.” He closed the gap between them again then, slid a hand into Martin’s hair, and drew their faces together for a gentle kiss. It was chaste and a bit awkward, and Jon’s mouth tasted strongly of blood, not that Martin suspected he was in any place to be judging.

            Martin didn’t press the kiss further, but he couldn’t stop himself from reaching up to tangle his hands in Jon’s hair. After a moment, Jon pulled back. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, and Martin felt self-consciousness rising up again to choke him.

            “ _Ask_ me,” he said firmly.

            “What do you want me to do?” Jon breathed again, but this time that lovely strange _pull_ threaded through his voice, reaching out and gently but firmly tugging the answer from Martin’s throat, “ _Touch me_.”

            “I would be very happy to touch you. Lie down.” Martin complied immediately, sparing a little energy to hope Georgie wouldn’t mind this happening in her spare room. Not that anything was happening yet—and then Jon’s long fingers swept across his chest, and he choked and hitched his hips upward.

            Jon bent over him, and Martin felt warm breath on his mouth. “I still want to see,” Jon murmured, and then those fingers were in his hair, sweeping it this way and the other, and Martin didn’t know how he was supposed to breathe, actually, thank you very much. His eyes were starting to unfocus, and he could hear someone making a series of very undignified noises. Someone who was probably not him. Okay, he might be lying about that. A bit.

            By the time Jon even moved away from his hair, Martin was a puddle of equal parts desperate arousal and melted relaxation. “You have a black eye,” Jon told him, his fingers shivering close but not touching the tender spot.

            “You can touch the bruises if you’re gentle,” Martin managed, somehow. “Just…just avoid the burns?”

            A finger trembled slightly against the flesh of his cheek, and Martin groaned. “Burns?” Jon echoed angrily.

            “There’s just a little one on the back of my hand and one on the inside of my knee.”

            “I thought you said you were fine!”

            “I _am_ fine!”

            Jon gave vent to a wordless growl, but he continued tracing his fingers avidly across Martin’s skin. He turned Martin’s head carefully from side to side, gave him a feather-light kiss on his nose, and then began tracing down lower. His hands were gentle and quite light, but the brush of those long fingers brought a rush of heat to Martin’s skin, and the feel of them lingered long after they had moved onward, the nerves that had been stimulated refusing to subside.

            By the time Jon reached Martin’s arm, having carefully examined every inch of Martin’s torso above the waist, brushing his fingers across it and regarding it with that intense, careful gaze, Martin was hard as a rock, aching, moaning, and desperate. “Please,” he said breathlessly. “Jon—would you—would you—touch my—my c-cock—”

            “But I need you to hold still,” Jon said reasonably. “And if I touch your erection, I don’t think you will.”

            “ _Jon_. I might _die_.”

            “Patience.”

            “Oh, _fuck_ ,” Martin whispered wholeheartedly as Jon worked his way down his left arm, as he, very gently, desperately carefully, spread out Martin’s hand. Through the blurry haze of arousal, Martin saw Jon’s lips get thinner.

            “I should have read another page,” he said darkly. “We’ll need to wrap this and bandage it once I’m finished.”

            “Once _I’m_ finished, please,” Martin groaned. Jon’s eyes flickered up to his face, and he snorted amusement.

            “That was puerile, Martin.”

            “I was being sincere!”

            “All right,” Jon said.

            “All right, you’ll t-touch me?”

            “All right, I’ll make sure you finish.” Jon was definitely smirking now. Martin writhed, reaching for himself with one hand, and Jon reached out and pinned his wrists into the bed. “You’re beautiful,” he said sincerely, and Martin thought he might be crying, although he wasn’t sure.

            “ _Please_ ,” he whined. Jon kissed his mouth, gentle and thorough, and Martin hitched his hips upward, unable to stop himself, brushing briefly against Jon’s clothed midsection, and it sent a shock of exquisite sensation through him that made him gasp and whine again.

            “All right,” Jon breathed. “But hold still again afterwards, I have to finish cataloguing you.” His hand closed around Martin, and Martin was immediately lost in the culminating flare of almost painful pleasure. He felt Jon’s hand tug along him long, leisurely, and slow, just twice, and then he twisted upward, following the pull; he was coming and coming and _coming_ , longer and harder than he thought he ever had before, vision whiting out in front of him.

            When he was finally able to—breathe, or see, or do anything that most human beings generally needed to do to function—he blearily opened his eyes to find that he was covered in semen and that Jon was smiling fondly at him and a little curiously continuing to stroke his hand across Martin’s now highly overstimulated member.

            “Ow,” he said. “Ow, Jon, stop, th-that’s—”

            “Sorry,” Jon said, letting him go, but he didn’t seem particularly sorry as he kissed Martin again. Limply, Martin kissed him back.

            “Jon,” he said, softly. “That was—”

            “Go on. _How was it_?”

            Martin shivered as the compulsion rattled deliciously through him again. “Amazing,” he groaned. “It was amazing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Kyros for letting me use his idea of Jon Asking someone how to kill/maim/hurt them.


	7. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Martin keeps a diary, and Jon goes to America.

**Excerpt from the diary of Martin Blackwood, June 7 th, 2017. **We met Nikola Orsinov today. It was horrible. I don’t want to think about it. It was polite, I suppose, for a creature like that. It seemed a bit deferential in some ways. Or—mockingly deferential. Like on the one hand it didn’t want to upset Jon, but on the other it found the whole thing a bit ridiculous.

            It was horrible. Really horrible. Not like Jon when he went—nothing like that. Just cold plastic made up into a human shape. It made my spine crawl horribly. Just. I don’t want to think about this much, but I suppose we’ve got to, haven’t we? We’ve got the stop the Unknowing somehow, whatever it is.

 

**Excerpt from the diary of Martin Blackwood, June 11 th, 2017.** I suppose we do have to do something about Elias. I don’t exactly like to think about it too hard. I mean, he’s awful, what he’s doing is way beyond workplace abuse. I mean, he beat an old man to death with a pipe. I still don’t actually know how to get my mind around that. Jon and I knew it had to be him, but watching the way he smiled when he confessed—I don’t want to think about that. It might be worse than the Orsinov thing.

            But I mean, he’s still Elias, sort of. I’d got used to putting “my kind of terrible boss” into a different box in my head from “that thing that’s keeping us trapped in the Archives.” But Tim’s right. We can’t let him just keep twitching all those strings like we’re puppets. Like he’s the spider in the center of some fucked-up web. Maybe we can’t kill him, but Jon knows how to use that Leitner, and he thinks he can use it to do precise enough damage to induce a coma.

 

**Excerpt from the diary of Martin Blackwood, June 26 th, 2017.** I wish Jon would come back. I hate not having him here. I just spend so much time worrying. And I know that’s stupid. It’s what has to happen. He’s doing what he needs to do, and I’m here at the other end of a phone to tell him to remember to eat and drink and read statements. And I’ll do that forever if it’s what he needs from me.

            I’ve been in and out of the Institute lately as well. Making tea for people, reading some statements myself—which I definitely don’t like doing. Tim’s been really withdrawn. Melanie tried to kill Elias at one point, and I had to get her and the others out for drinks so I could go over the whole plan with them. Having her trying to kill Elias when he’s not distracted is just asking for trouble. G-d, I sound so callous.

 

            **A telephone conversation, July 1 st, 2017.**

            “Hello?”

            “Martin.”

            “Jon. Thank _god_. Where have you been, you haven’t—”

            “I know. I’m sorry. Listen, I don’t know how much time we have left. I’m taking the next flight back.”

            “Are you all right?”

            “I’m—very tired.”

            “Jon…”

            “I know. I’m trying. It’s been a long few days.”

            “When you get back, we’ll—”

            “We’ll talk about what we’re going to do. Let’s not say anymore.”

            “Right. Yeah. Of course. So you’ll be back soon?”

            “Yeah.”

            “…”

            “…”

            “Martin?”

            “Yeah?”

            “I love you.”

            “Oh! I—I love you, too.”

            “Goodbye.”

            “Bye.”

 

~

            It was the night before the Unknowing. Jon moved through everything in a kind of exhausted haze, trying to make sure they were all coordinating with each other all right. Tim and Melanie would be planting the explosives. Basira and Daisy would be holding down the fort at the Institute. And Jon and Martin would be left to deal with Elias.

            Martin. Jon looked up, needing to see him again. He’d been getting headaches lately, probably from exhaustion, accompanied with a slight blurriness of vision that was probably the result of staring too hard at a variety of statements. But watching Martin—well, it didn’t do much about the headache, but it did seem to help clear up his vision.

            Right now he was stood in front of the window, two lit candles in front of him, praying quietly in Hebrew. His voice shaped the words into a kind of steady, soothing background hum. He’d done the same every night since Jon got back; apparently, according to Georgie, he’d started doing it right after Jon dropped off the grid in America.

            Jon waited until he turned around again, about to ask him what the translation of what he had been saying was, but his words were stilled by the sight of Martin’s face. The candles, after all, were directly behind him. It was impossible that their warm light should be reflected in his glasses, but Jon swore he could see two tiny flickering points of light in those shimmering depths. And then, as Martin stripped off his glasses to rub at the bridge of nose tiredly, he realized that it was not his glasses. There were two tiny motes of light glimmering in the depths of Martin’s _eyes_.

            “Martin,” he breathed, and Martin looked up and smiled, tired but tender.

            “Yeah?”

            “I…” Jon’s words failed him, so he held out a hand. Martin took it. “Let me see you,” Jon said. Martin smiled, and his eyes lit up like stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter because a) Nikola has learned from Jude Perry that, um, maybe Not and b) most of the rest of the setup doesn't change hugely.


	8. Stagecraft

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everything goes to hell.

 

            The abandoned wax museum was little more than a single high, brick wall with a rough, splintered wooden floor before it. Jon, Martin, and Elias had been watching it for five hours now, from the broad glass window of an unused office building across the street. When they had first arrived, a little after midnight, it had been silent and empty apart from the unmoving wax figures, locked into their unnatural poses. Martin drowsed against Jon for a few hours; Jon thought he might have nodded off himself, but he suspected Elias had not slept at all.

            Near sunrise, white figures began to move around the wax museum. At first, just one or two, moving with a balletic grace, but as they twirled and pranced near the others, the abandoned wax figures slowly seemed to awaken. They moved jerkily at first, but their movements grew more confident and fluid as time went on. At the horizon, a single golden beam of light shot into the sky. Jon glanced over at Martin, who was white and pale. Jon suspected he didn’t look much better. It was time for them to act.

            The Leitner was heavy in Jon’s pocket as he rose to his feet and stretched. Elias glanced briefly sideways but made no move to stop either of them as he put out a hand to Martin, who winced and groaned, something in his back making an audible cracking noise as he got to his feet as well. “Loo?” Jon asked.

            “Yeah,” Martin agreed.

            “Don’t take too long,” Elias cautioned them.

            “We won’t,” Jon agreed. As soon as they had passed behind Elias’s chair, he reached into his pocket and took out _Lamb to the Slaughter_. The thick leather cover was damp beneath his fingers, and even from here he could faintly smell the aroma of blood. Martin reached out to squeeze his hand and nod, grim-faced and pale, and Jon took a deep breath and steadied himself. This was a necessary step in the plan. He raised the Leitner, checking the page numbers at the bottom to find the correct place without reading anything he shouldn’t.

            He wasn’t expecting the sudden creak of the door opening, and instead of finding the passage he needed, he looked up to see Nikola Orsinov stood there, flanked on either side by half-formed mannequins carrying extremely well-formed knives. “Oh, shi—” Jon started, and then she was moving in a weird stop-motion blur, so fast he didn’t have a chance to react before she collided with him, bearing him back into the wall with an audible crack. He gasped as the air was expelled from his lungs, and by the time he was capable of clearing the dizzy spots from in front of his eyes, there was a hand on his wrist, and then there was a sharp, burning agony through the center of his hand.

            Jon’s knees buckled, and he thought he had made a noise, but the pain seemed to hold him up, dangling from his hand, unable to sink further. He tried to reach for the trapped hand with the free one, but he couldn’t find it, and he sobbed, trying to worm his way back up the wall.

            “Jon!” Martin’s terrified cry made him try to fight against it, but it was too much, his hand, his _hand_ —

            And then everything was still except for the sound of his harsh, pained breathing in his ears. Slowly, the blurriness faded from Jon’s eyes, and he was able to see that Martin was being held, pinned, by a dancer, that Nikola Orsinov herself stood beside him, smiling and smiling, her hand still on the dagger that had gone directly through his hand and the Leitner beneath it, pinning him to the wall. Then Elias swiveled the desk chair, turned, and rose to his feet.

            “Really, Jon,” he said. “I am quite hurt that you would _also_ attempt to kill me.”

            “What are you—doing?” Jon rasped through the pain. “What are you—”

            “Thank you, Ms. Orsinov,” Elias said. “I am quite indebted to you for your assistance.”

            “And my prize?” she asked, her voice gleeful, high and tinny.

            Elias, still smiling that horrible beatific smile, nodded. “My traitorous Archivist,” he said, quite quietly, as he ran his fingers along Jon’s cheekbone.

            “Why—why are you—” Jon gasped, and he could feel _it_ threading through his words, but before he could finish, Elias pressed him back against the wall and kissed him, hard and biting and bloody.

            “Be quiet if you know what’s good for you,” Elias said, drawing back. Jon spat bloody saliva at him, but Elias just kept on smiling that smile that was almost as frozen as Orsinov’s as he reached into his pocket, found a handkerchief, and wiped off his cheek. “Really, Jon,” he said mildly. “Did you honestly think I wouldn’t know? Martin’s journal is _such_ an entertaining read.”

            A tiny horrified squeak from the other side of the room. Jon felt icewater soaking his veins as he looked up to meet Martin’s gaze.

            “Oh, no, no, no,” Martin said. “No, you _can’t_ —I—I didn’t record—”

            “You tried to hide something from me by _writing it down_ , Martin,” Elias said. “That’s adorable. Something to consider in future.”

            Nikola laughed at that, high and delighted. “May we have them both?” she asked brightly. “The Archivist _and_ his Candle?”

            For an instant something like concern or maybe just calculation flitted across Elias’s face, and then he shrugged smoothly. “As you like. I suppose the Archives will need restructuring soon in any case.”

            “No!” Jon cried, struggling to free his hands from Orsinov’s rigid grasp. “Elias, you can’t— _please_ —”

            Across the room, Martin was sobbing, a set of broken little noises that more than the pain threatened to crack Jon open. “I’m sorry,” he said, and Jon’s eyes caught his. “Oh, god, Jon, I am so sorry, this is all my fault.”

            “May I make one request?” Elias said pleasantly to Orsinov. “In return for my—promise to give you no trouble.”

            “What’s that?”

            Elias looked at Jon, his eyes devoid of emotion. “Let him watch,” he said softly. “Maim him or carve him open if you like, but let him watch the world shift.”

            “Give you some small touch of power when the world is reborn, you mean? Oh, very well, it’s not _me_ who’s wanted to make an enemy of the Beholding. You’ve just always been so tiresome.” She ran a smooth, sharp hand down the side of Jon’s face. “Besides, he’ll make a lovely decoration.”

            “Thank you,” Elias said. “Farewell, Jon.”

            Jon watched helplessly as his employer waved a laconic hand and exited the room. Then he gasped in shocked pain as Nikola yanked the knife out and spun him around, into the waiting arms of a group of the mannequin dancers. The smile on her plastic face was Glasgow-grin wide. “It was a lovely little try, Archivist. It’s such a shame when workplace disputes get in the way of a good outcome,” she said. Jon bowed his head, feeling sick weariness overtake him. He heard Martin’s voice cursing, the sound of a struggle, then a blow.

            “Don’t,” he begged, the words torn out of him. “All right, look, you win. You won. But I’m the Archivist. Let Martin go.”

            “Oh, no, dear, he has such lovely skin!” Nikola laughed delightedly, her voice high and strange and sparkling like circus music.

            Jon tried to find some words or knowledge that would save them, but with his books, his artefacts, even his recorder torn from his hands, the only thing he could do was choke out, “Why are you doing this?” barely even aware of the power even as it rushed from his own mouth.

            Nikola just laughed, showing teeth that were spindle-sharp. “Because I want to!” she replied immediately.

            Hands grabbed Jon then, pointed, sharp, dry hands, too many to come from one person, but perhaps not too many to come from one of the Stranger’s _things_. He was hoisted into the air, and he heard Martin’s voice, high and frightened, gabbling the only Hebrew _Jon_ —not the Archivist—knew, over and over again. It took every ounce of strength left inside him, but he raised his head to look at Martin, caught and held by the metal hands as well. Martin’s face was pale, his freckles standing out dark against the rest of it, his shock of brown-blond hair standing up the way it sometimes did when he woke in the middle of the night when one or the other of them had nightmares. Waking up next to Martin had become so _usual_ ; it was hard for Jon to realize it would never happen again.

            Being dragged out into the chilly early morning air was like being dunked into ice water after the musty old office building. The sun was rising over what now appeared to be a hastily constructed wooden stage, but its rays were cold and distant, its light no comfort. A thousand inhuman hands passed Jon up to the stage as if he were already nothing more than dead meat. He couldn’t see much beyond a seething ocean of plastic limbs, so it was an unpleasant surprise when he was pushed against something that felt like thousands of little slivers of glass near the back of the stage. One of the mannequins wrenched his arms up over his head and bound them so that, although his toes touched the ground, he couldn’t put his full weight on them. He was forced to attempt to hold himself up, and he could tell he would soon be making a tradeoff between the pain at his back and the pain in his arms and his legs.

            “I’m sorry,” Martin said miserably beside him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Over and over again until Jon wanted to scream at him to be quiet, that it wasn’t his fault, that—instead he turned his head and looked at Martin with exhaustion. Just looked. Absorbed the splash of freckles across his nose, the rumpled fair hair on his head, the way his arms tightened in an attempt to take a little of the weight off his toes. The stars in his eyes that still glittered there, hidden and deep, but still visible to Jon. Finally, Martin’s well of apologies seemed to run dry, and he went quiet.

            Eerie calliope music began to play. Jon’s legs trembled beneath him, and he groaned. A troupe of garishly colored dancers assembled in front of him and Martin. Nikola Orsinov chasséd into position in front of them and paused, one foot fluttering in a repetitive string of battements. Then she held up a baton; the calliope music swelled to a crescendo and then stopped as she flicked it once in the air, then a second time towards Jon and Martin.

            Hands grabbed Jon, pawing, inhuman, plastic hands, and he felt the sharp point of a knife resting in his suprasternal notch, so shockingly cold it drew all his focus away from the rest of his body and down to that single point. He wanted to shut his eyes, not to look at the half-melted grinning visage of the thing with its knifepoint at his chest, but he was the Archivist. He would not turn away.

            All the determination in the world did nothing to mitigate the sensation of the knife penetrating flesh. The pain was hot, the intruding point icy-cold. The movement was obscenely slow; the pain dragged in the wake of the knife, agonizing and inescapable. Red welled up and trickled down Jon’s chest, and he was begging for it to stop, unable to keep the words back, low, desperate pleas that went entirely ignored—perhaps even unheard over the cheerful tinkling music. As the knife reached the base of his breast-bone it sank in farther, bringing with a new wash of pain, and he screamed and could not stop. The noises Martin was making beside him weren’t screams, and Jon wished they were.

            Although moisture collected in his eyes and overflowed down his cheeks, the tears did not diminish his clarity of vision; he watched as Nikola Orsinov conducted his and Martin’s disembowelment with that constant half-smirking wide red smile. As the inexorable knife continued its descent, the smell of sweat and wax in the air turned to blood. Jon’s throat was raw with screaming by the time she turned her baton back to the dancers.

            Finally, when Jon had dissolved into muttering breathless, pained obscenities, almost unable to get the breath into his lungs to do so, the now-warm knife was withdrawn. He took in a gasp of air, and then found it expelled again as those rough hands penetrated the injury. The noise that burst out of his throat was something like a high-pitched squeal, nothing remotely human anymore, and he was begging again, half-formed, desperate noises that were meant to be a plea to _make it stop_ , the pain, the sickening feeling of his skin and flesh being _peeled back_ like the rind of a fruit, the squelching noise and slick feeling of his organs tumbling out of a space they were no longer held into.

            Head swimming, rough sobs spilling from his throat, he turned his head sideways to look at Martin and found that he was smiling.

~

            Martin was smiling because he wasn’t going to be afraid. Okay, so he might still not really know where he stood on the faith he’d been born into, and he really didn’t want to die, and he was in a lot of pain, because having your skin peeled back and your insides on display, well, that turned out to be painful, who knew?

            Oh, and judging from that, he was probably also a little hysterical, and angry, and had he mentioned the pain? But he wasn’t going to be afraid, he was so tired of being afraid all the time, and being in pain and dying and wanting to cry because Jon was dying too—that was _enough_ emotions. He didn’t need the fear to bother taking up space in there as well. So he looked sideways at Jon, and he didn’t look at what they’d done to Jon’s torso; he just looked into Jon’s tired, fearful eyes, and he smiled.

            “I love you,” he said, and he didn’t know if Jon could hear it, and mostly he was sobbing it, actually, because it did hurt, it hurt so much, but surely Jon could see his lips moving. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

            That was when the earth moved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Kyros and lontradiction for letting me use their idea/exchange of Martin writing things down rather than recording them and that being a Mistake.


	9. Statement Begins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jon sees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cover art by Zomburai :)))

            [CLICK]

 

            The ritual of the hanging tree is a sacrifice most often performed for knowledge, sometimes to restore the balance of the world between fear and hope. Joshua should not have been afraid. If he had not been afraid, the ritual would have worked, and we would have pulled the world away from the brink of fear.

            But he was not ready, and he was abandoned by his friends, left alone on the tree, with fear as his only companion. The world turned, and when the sun rose on his battered corpse, it rose on a world devoid of that which mattered most to him. We tried to destroy fear, and we succeeded only in destroying hope.

           

            [CLICK]

            [CLICK]

 

            Fear without hope is like flame without light or knowledge without understanding. Yet in these of my later years I have come to realize that hope without fear is like day without night. Even if we had succeeded in what we hoped to do, we would have been left with a half-world, muted with light as our world is now muted with shadow.

            We were fools. Ashera, forgive us.

 

            [CLICK]

            [CLICK]

 

            It’s dark. It’s a darkness so complete and profound I can feel it all the way into my bones, seeping into my flesh, but I don’t believe it is the fearful Dark. It’s too neutral, and besides, it’s the Unknowing that’s happening, not whatever the equivalent ritual would be for the Dark. I know this. I know—

           

            [CLICK]

            [CLICK]

 

            They took my recorder, but I can feel its weight heavy in my pocket, and yet it is still dark here. I can see nothing. Is there nothing to see? It’s one of those rare occasions I wish I had a faith like Martin’s. I cannot _pray_ to the Eye; I can only worship it, and without sight I cannot even do that much.

            Where is the pain? I know I was in pain. They sliced me open and pinned the skin back and left me hanging there, a silent witness to the Unknowing. I could feel my life trickling out, and I watched as the same happened to Martin, and then he smiled at me, and then it was so dark. It’s so dark.

 

            [CLICK]

            [CLICK]

 

            There is a bright light that slices through the dark, and I can see. I can see everything. The whole universe, down to its root, down to its tiniest atom and beyond, the quarks vibrating in their soupy mess, the strings playing their celestial symphony. Up to its leaves, the stars whirling in their dance, born from the nebulae above our heads, forming and burning and winking out like candles, over and over and over again. And everything in between, every person, every entity, everything. I don’t have the words to describe it. I don’t know if there are words that can describe it.

           

            [CLICK]

            [CLICK]

 

            I see Martin. He’s as tall as the stars and as tiny as the quarks. There are suns in his eyes and galaxies in his smile. In his hand there’s a candle formed from the Milky Way, and he’s all light. He’s nothing but light. I’ve never seen a light like this.

            He’s standing in front of the curtains in Georgie’s flat and looking out. He’s holding a cup of tea, and the steam of it curls upwards in repetitive patterns that shift too quickly to become fractals. He turns and looks at me, and I’m lying in the air bed, and I’m in pain, and he reaches out his hand and smiles and twitches the curtains open behind him.

            Sunlight pours in.

 

            [CLICK]

            [CLICK]

 

            …ment of Elias Bouchard, regarding the end of the world. Statement never taken.

 

            I did not want to see Jonathan pinned like a fly on the wall, spilling out his intestines for the delight of that circus freak. If I could have taken his place, I would have done so, both because I have a certain amount of respect for the man and because I would give anything in my possession to see what he is seeing now.

            From under this table, with the earth moving about, I can see much less, but someone must record this, as Jon is in no fit state to do so. After convincing Nikola Orsinov to gut Jon and hang him, I left and found what I hoped was an appropriate vantage point to observe. It is both ironic and useful that Nikola did not know of the hanging tree ritual. At least, I presume she did not, as I do not believe she would otherwise have allowed me to coopt her Unknowing for the Eye’s purposes.

            It was a pity about Martin. He had become less and less touched by the Archive since he disappeared with Jon after the unfortunate incident involving the death of Jurgen Leitner. Although I was quite able to read his journal, he did not have many insights what Entity’s attention he might have attracted, although the Cult of the Lightless Flame kidnapped him in an attempt to try and discern it, since it seemed to be almost the opposite of their own. Despite these possible growing ties to a different power, I will admit to being somewhat attached to Martin. At times he demonstrates a remarkably pragmatic streak, and I was quite impressed with his insights regarding corkscrews during the Jane Prentiss incident.

            Nonetheless, there was little I could do to save him without tipping my hand, so I watched as Orsinov and the rest sliced my Archivist and his “Candle” open and hung them on a high construction made of chicken wire. They screamed. I imagine I would have, as well. It looked quite painful. Orsinov’s dancers peeled back the skin, and I was able to see both of their hearts beating inside their rib cages. Jonathan looked at Martin in a way that I would describe as ‘seeking comfort’, and Martin smiled, at which point I presume Melanie and Tim successfully set off a very large quantity of explosives beneath the stage.

            It was too late. Reality was already being peeled. The earth inverted. Nikola Orsinov segmented it between her fingers. All around Jon and Martin, things melted like plastic. I don’t know where most of me went, in fact. But Jon remained there, hanging; if anything, he was easier to see than he had been when the Unknowing began. Martin was difficult to look at. He was shining with a strange light that grew brighter and brighter.

            The chicken wire flaked away and in its place, there was a thick tree, to which both the Archivist and his assistant were bound. Their blood trickled down and fed its roots, and Jon opened his Eyes and looked at me.

 

            [CLICK]

 

            The breath seemed different in Jon’s lungs, fresher and softer simultaneously. Cautiously, he wriggled inside the soft, encasing earth, trying to feel whether his organs were in their correct location or not. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but Martin was yelling his name, and he was starting to hear the sounds of digging overhead. The single shaft of sunlight expanded into a bright wash of light and colors, and then a hand was reaching down towards him. The single freckle just beneath the third finger knuckle told him immediately whose it was.

            Jon grabbed Martin’s hand, and then he was being pulled up and up, through earth and clay and roots to burst from the ground and stumble forward onto his knees. He was covered in blood and dirt and itching ferociously, inside and out. He knew Tim and Melanie were there before he saw them. No, that wasn’t right. He saw Tim and Melanie behind him without turning his head. He looked up at Martin, and he had to raise a hand to shield his eyes and then squint when that didn’t help.

            Martin was and wasn’t shining, both at once. The Martin in his normal vision looked just like normal Martin—a little more exhausted, one of the lenses in his glasses shattered. His shirt was hanging in rags around him and there was blood spattered everywhere, but he was just as miraculously whole as Jon was. The Martin in Jon’s new, painful, _other_ vision, though—he was so bright it was hard to look at. He was a Martin-shaped outline that was huge and small at the same time, the twin stars in his eyes flickering with wonder and love. “Oh, my god,” Jon said, and something inside himself tried to pull a reference from a piece of knowledge he hadn’t known he’d known. Such a jumble of information swam across his consciousness that he couldn’t make sense of it all, but he caught a glimpse of _hope_ and _the Burning Light_ and made a mental note to sort through some more of it later.

            “Jon, what the—what the _fuck_ —” Tim stammered, and Jon turned his attention briefly in Tim’s direction, discovering that there were chains about Tim’s wrists and throat, chains that did not bow to the direction of gravity but instead stretched directly sideways towards—ah.

            Tim was horrified, judging from the expression on his face, Jon thought. He suspected he could be certain if he tilted his attention in the right way, but that would keep. Right now there were a few somewhat more pressing things to deal with. The first held and was held by the chains binding Tim, and the huge eye blinking in the center of his forehead caught and held the gaze of Jon’s—new, irregular vision.

            “You _asshole_ ,” Jon spat. With Martin’s help, he got to his feet, took two steps across the new-grown grass, and punched Elias in the face.

            Melanie and Tim turned their attention from staring openmouthed at Jon to Elias. With a wordless growl, Tim raised his axe and began to advance. Jon held up a hand; when Tim seemed inclined to ignore that, he said, “I think he can free you now, but I wouldn’t chance killing him.”

            “Thank you, Jon,” Elias said, and Jon heard _Thank you_ , and _I appreciate your cool head_ , and _I love you_ all tangled up in his voice. That last Jon had no intention of engaging with today or possibly ever.

            “He tried to _kill you_!” Tim burst out.

            “I didn’t just try,” Elias said, managing dignity despite the bruise blooming on his jaw. “I _did_ kill him. Or rather, I talked Nikola Orsinov into doing it for me. She was remarkably obliging.”

            Growl from Tim; obscenity from Melanie. Jon regarded Elias coolly. “You would manage your employees better if you didn’t have such a penchant for technical truths,” he told Elias. Elias gazed back with a strange expression that Jon shouldn’t have been able to recognize as a mix of pride and longing. He sighed. He was very tired. At his side, Martin burned warmly.

            “Okay, look—” Martin broke in, and his voice was warmth and comfort and Jon just wanted to melt away into him. “Look, the world’s—um, the Unknowing didn’t happen and a lot of other things _did_ , I’m, I’m pretty sure?”

            “At least two other rituals went off perfectly,” Jon agreed. “Elias was planning for the first, but not the second.”

            “Is the first the thing that’s made you look like a bloody freak?” Tim snarled.

            Jon turned all his eyes on him and tilted his head, and Tim sucked in a quick breath and danced backward. “Yes,” Jon said. “The hanging tree. It was quite clever.”

            “It was,” Elias agreed.

            Martin groaned. “ _Please_ stop encouraging him. Tim’s going to cut his head off, and I kind of want to as well. Look—listen—can I keep talking, please?”

            Jon leaned tiredly against him, nodding into his shoulder. Melanie and Tim glanced at each other, but Tim lowered the axe slightly. Elias’s eyes went from Jon to Martin, and a strange expression passed over his face. “Go ahead, Martin,” he said, and now Jon heard _I’m grateful that you lived as well_ and _You are no longer ours_ , clashing and discordant in their simultaneity.

            “Okay, so. _Stuff_ happened. Really big stuff. And we’re not going to be able to deal with most of it now, honestly, because we’re all tired and messed up and Jon and I are—are—are—” Martin’s voice wobbled. “Not really human? I think. Still _us_ , right, but _different_ us. And it’s a lot to deal with and sort out and I’d just really like it if we could not hate each other right now because I know some of us have done really pretty bad things but we’re all still—I mean at the base of it, we’re still in this together.” One hand petted Jon’s hair protectively, and Jon made a noise that wasn’t a sob. “Even Elias,” Martin sighed. “It’s the world—it’s been out of balance for so long, and I mean—Jon—in another world what are we?”

            Jon _understood_ and _looked_ and then he laughed. “In another world, we work at a university and yell at Elias for being pompous and go out to the pub together on Fridays,” he said. “There’s more, but I—don’t want to keep looking too hard. I don’t want to see the— _bad_ worlds right now.”

            “Right, yeah, well, not so sure we should add a pub to this mix, but, um.” Martin swallowed. “Let’s collect Basira and Daisy and go to Georgie’s apartment and I will make a lot of tea. Okay? I think she probably even has enough squashy chocolate to go around.”

            “This is ridiculous, you know,” Melanie said, but she didn’t sound particularly upset, just tired. “All right, Martin, but only because you’re some kind of—of angel, and I think if we didn’t listen to you, we’d—” she paused, with a peculiar expression on her face, “—um, be sad? Huh.”

            “I’m not going t-to pour the tea down your throat.” His smile was a little hurt, a little scared, still very Martin. The light burning like an inferno inside him—that was new, but it was very Martin, too. Jon pressed his face into Martin’s neck, and Martin’s arm tightened around him. “I’m still me,” Martin said in a very small voice. “And Jon’s still—”

            “Yeah, guess he’s always been a freak,” Tim conceded, but there was no bite in his voice any longer. “All right, this is stupid, but—all right.”

            The sun was coming up over the horizon, warm and bright in a way Jon had never seen it. Again, he felt that strange, soft absence of fear and he curled against Martin, who made a quiet, needy sound.

            “It’s like watching a pair of doves,” Melanie said, in a strange voice. “How’s he bending the wings like that anyway?”

            “Ugh, can you two stop being cute so that we can go?” Tim demanded in a long-suffering tone of voice. _I don’t know why I’m so much calmer and I don’t think I like it_. And the strange double-vision image of himself and Martin wrapped in vast dark-feathered wings that bent in impossible ways and whose many eclectic eyes blinked slowly, focusing and unfocusing.

            Jon took a long, shuddering breath. “Martin,” he said, as all of them got up and started walking. “I—I don’t know what the world will be like when we really go out and look. But I want to see it with you.”

            Martin hummed in response. “Wherever you go, I’m going too,” he said firmly. “And it is better. I know it is. In my bones.”

            Jon thought in a little while he would be able to see that it was. He tipped Martin’s face sideways and kissed him.

 

 

_He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can_.—J.R.R. Tolkien

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I recognize that I deliberately went a bit light with the explanation in this fic in favor of implication and intimation. If you're confused or want me to clarify something please feel free to comment or ping me on discord or whatever you like :)
> 
> Also check it the other side of the cover is now in the first chapter!


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